Opinion: What do you think about a centralised bitcoin-like digital currency?

[krogan]

We are doing a feasibility study for a project we are about to embark upon and would like your opinion.

We want to create a payment platform much like bitcoin and other altcoins. The difference is that we plan to make it centralized which means there is no concept of blockchain.

We have nothing against decentralized sytems or the blockchain and other innovative components of cryptocurrencies. We just don't want to be yet another altcoin and this is a project that is meant to be like e-gold. When developed we hope for global adoption but our target market are places where online payment is still very unreliable, difficult, expensive and even non-existent.

One of the issues that is unclear is the creation and distribution of our digital "coin" in a way that does not look like we are trying to cash in on the crypto craze and make quick cash. The absence of a blockchain means we may have to do a 100% "pre-mine" of whatever quantity of the "coin" we fix and then share them like Ripple did - This doesn't sound great to me. We are exploring a number of ways to allow anyone generate/earn the coins in a fair way and freely trade in exchanges. Two of these ways are:

1. Allow people join a game of chance where they (a client app) try to guess a random number selected by the system. Clients who get the number correctly get some “coins" as a reward. This seem fair and simple. We could add some kind of difficulty to make guessing difficult as time passes. Not as innovative as the blockchain but could work.

2. Premine the coins and share to everyone. I imagine this approach would not result in the coin having any significant value as it was freely distributed.

We have a couple of questions:

1. What would it take for you to consider investing in a centralised and well funded bitcoin-like
payment platform?

2. How do you think we can efficiently, fairly generate/produce/mine and distribute the virtual currency?

3. Do you think this is even a feasible concept? We don’t want to start something that no one would use.

Please kindly share your thoughts as they are greatly needed
Thanks

[unent]

You could try giving them away to bitcointalk members, but how could your coin work without a blockchain?

[krogan]

You could try giving them away to bitcointalk members, but how could your coin work without a blockchain?

Giving them to bitcointalk members isn't a bad idea but that would mean some of it has to be pre-mined from thin air. The plan is to figure out a credible/morally justified way of producing this coin without a blockchain. Transactions would be processed by servers controlled by us since this will not be a decentralised platform. We don't even get to call it a cryptocurrency as it doesn't have the characteristics that make up a true cryptocurrency.

[krogan]

Something like Ripple?
Its the future for real adoption imo.

 

Not exactly like ripple. Our approach isn't decentralised like ripple. One might say it goes against everything cryptocurrency stands for. But we want to develop a platform/ecosystem that allows financial applications to be built on top it without the complexity of doing this on a decentralised network

[bee7]

If it is centralised and it has no publicly available blockchain then there is no reason to discuss it in the light of the cryptocurrency: there is no difference with e-gold or paypal of visa or mastercard: you just know that some server has a db that contains a record with your available balance.

The most important motivation for Satoshi (or last drop that pushed him, I do not know precisely, but he mentioned exactly that event in his whitepaper) to develop the blockchain technology was a egold collapse caused by feds: they just shut it down. Any centralised solution may be shut down.

[unent]

Something like Ripple?
Its the future for real adoption imo.

 

Not exactly like ripple. Our approach isn't decentralised like ripple. One might say it goes against everything cryptocurrency stands for. But we want to develop a platform/ecosystem that allows financial applications to be built on top it without the complexity of doing this on a decentralised network

That makes it sound like online banking. Are there any regulations you need to comply with like money transmitter licenses?

[cakebet]

1) The promise that an existing governmental system isn't going to try and take a chunk of it every time I do anything with the coins. 

2) Distribute the coins to people with student loan debt. Then get the big government subsidized lenders like Sallie Mae, Navient, and all the rest to take accept it as payment.

3) Maybe. It's going to be hard to get someone to value something that they can't currently use anywhere. Your target market is probably offline because they lack the technology infrastructure or the time to think beyond obtaining their basic necessities.

#my2cents

We are doing a feasibility study for a project we are about to embark upon and would like your opinion.

We want to create a payment platform much like bitcoin and other altcoins. The difference is that we plan to make it centralized which means there is no concept of blockchain.

We have nothing against decentralized sytems or the blockchain and other innovative components of cryptocurrencies. We just don't want to be yet another altcoin and this is a project that is meant to be like e-gold. When developed we hope for global adoption but our target market are places where online payment is still very unreliable, difficult, expensive and even non-existent.

One of the issues that is unclear is the creation and distribution of our digital "coin" in a way that does not look like we are trying to cash in on the crypto craze and make quick cash. The absence of a blockchain means we may have to do a 100% "pre-mine" of whatever quantity of the "coin" we fix and then share them like Ripple did - This doesn't sound great to me. We are exploring a number of ways to allow anyone generate/earn the coins in a fair way and freely trade in exchanges. Two of these ways are:

1. Allow people join a game of chance where they (a client app) try to guess a random number selected by the system. Clients who get the number correctly get some “coins" as a reward. This seem fair and simple. We could add some kind of difficulty to make guessing difficult as time passes. Not as innovative as the blockchain but could work.

2. Premine the coins and share to everyone. I imagine this approach would not result in the coin having any significant value as it was freely distributed.

We have a couple of questions:

1. What would it take for you to consider investing in a centralised and well funded bitcoin-like
payment platform?

2. How do you think we can efficiently, fairly generate/produce/mine and distribute the virtual currency?

3. Do you think this is even a feasible concept? We don’t want to start something that no one would use.

Please kindly share your thoughts as they are greatly needed
Thanks

[krogan]

If it is centralised and it has no publicly available blockchain then there is no reason to discuss it in the light of the cryptocurrency: there is no difference with e-gold or paypal of visa or mastercard: you just know that some server has a db that contains a record with your available balance.

The most important motivation for Satoshi (or last drop that pushed him, I do not know precisely, but he mentioned exactly that event in his whitepaper) to develop the blockchain technology was a egold collapse caused by feds: they just shut it down. Any centralised solution may be shut down.

This is true. The only similarity our concept shares with cryptocurrency is our need to use a kind of digital currency. I believe the most important question needing answer is how we intend to come about this digital currency. We have no blockchain so we can't "mine" coins and trying to mimicking this process seems like we are trying hard to be similar to cryptocurrency. Thanks

[krogan]

Something like Ripple?
Its the future for real adoption imo.

 

Not exactly like ripple. Our approach isn't decentralised like ripple. One might say it goes against everything cryptocurrency stands for. But we want to develop a platform/ecosystem that allows financial applications to be built on top it without the complexity of doing this on a decentralised network

That makes it sound like online banking. Are there any regulations you need to comply with like money transmitter licenses?

Our plan is to build the platform and open it up for others to use it. We are not quite sure if certain regulations would require us to get a money transmitter licence. We initially thought as the platform, we may not need this since we would not be the ones developing mobile banking or money transmitting applications.